Help developing a "Texture" app

Easel App Development
1

Hi All,

I’m going to attempt to make a “texture” app, but I’m having a little trouble figuring out exactly what the app should do.

The steps i imagine:

  1. Select a shape: square, circle, polygon, etc. where you want your texture to be
  2. Select a texture type from a dropdown
  3. Modify x & y scale, modify height, modify vertical and horizontal position, modify angle, skew pattern, set margins, etc.
  4. Import the texture as a single or multiple shapes, or as multiple paths, depending on the texture type.

Now I should be able to get the above workflow working with textures like so: http://www.heropatterns.com/

However, any textures that require variable depth would be difficult to produce. Currently you would need to create a long slot and run a v-carve to achieve this effect. But if you overlap two of these shapes, they end up calculating as a single pocket and you lose the texture effect.

I’m going to submit a feature request for variable depth along a path, this would solve the issue above. However, I don’t know how difficult this would be to implement for their development team.

I will work to get a mockup made to post here for others to critique.

One thought I did just have was to have the app actually generate gcode specifically for creating the texture, which you could then save and import into a separate workspace. You would be on your own for simulating the gcode using another application to verify that the result is correct. Thoughts on this?

Again, any suggestions would be appreciated!

Cheers,
Ethan

2

hi.

it would be great for me to be able to create texture fills, especially as i often use a diamond drag engraver to make printing blocks. a texture fill would mean i could create blocks of colour in the final print. looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

Antoinette

3

It looks like you’re devoting a lot to help out Inventables and the community here…thank you for that!
Can you, as the developer, test these apps?

How would one integrate that texture with an Easel Design in that case? Say I wanted to have a textured background with a raised icon from Easel. I don’t know that a separate, standalone solution that just creates texture would be a valuable use of your time.
Carbide Create can generate textures.

5

Thanks for the compliment! Means a lot.

Well, it was a fly-by thought. It would have to generate the gcode for the texture with the specified parameters from the app. Then somehow the user would have to save the gcode and import into a separate workspace. Problem there is you can’t move it around or anything. a lot of ifs and variables i just don’t know about yet.

It will take some experimenting to see what is possible.

6

Hi Antoinette, Can you define for me what you mean by a texture fill? Perhaps a photo?

Thanks,
Ethan

7

I’ve started working on the texture app. Here is where I am currently:

com-optimize
com-optimize800×722 2.98 MB

You can choose from predefined textures or add your own pattern in the form of svg path data. (One path only)

Let me know what you all think.

Cheers,
Ethan

1 Like
8

Thank very much for working on this, looks promising.

9

Hi,

Any news on this?

10

It’s still under review by Inventables